I want to appear on top of Google Searches. What should I do?

The question is quite broad, as almost everyone wants to gain top search rankings on Google search results.

The million-dollar question is,

How come?

Let’s first understand how Google search works.

Google says they use a computer-generated program called web crawlers.

And these crawlers crawl your website pages. However, Google receives a vast number of manual submissions as well.

Google says manual submission is acceptable, but their crawlers automatically fetch and index pages in their database.

An important note, Google says they do not accept payments for submission of your websites or rank them higher.

Google search works in three stages:

1. Crawling
2. Indexing
3. Serving search results

Let’s discuss crawling

New web pages are published every minute worldwide, and to find those pages Google search program crawls them, and the process is called URL discovery.

Google says they use a massive set of computers to find out and examine billions of webpages via Googlebot, also termed a search bot or Google search spider.

And search bots are programmed for:

1. Which site to crawl
2. How often they will crawl
3. How many pages to fetch from each website

Googlebot ensures to avoid slowing down the website.

However, Googlebot doesn’t crawl all the pages. Why?

1. Blocked pages are not crawled
2. Pages in passwords are not accessible, thus not crawled
3. Duplicates of previously crawled pages

Google says, during the crawl the search bot renders webpages using the latest browser of chrome, exactly how you will do it using chrome

The reason is that java-script is widely used, and without rendering, Googlebot cannot see the page content.

You can handle the crawling using the robots.txt file, where you can entirely or partially block search bots.

For example, a website on a test server which you don’t want to be crawled.

Next is Indexing

Indexing means understanding what the page is all about. At this stage, Googlebot understands textual content, images, videos, and scripts on your webpage. Like:

• Meta Titles,
• Meta Descriptions, Alt tags or Image tag optimization
• Understanding the difference between static and dynamic URLs,
• Webpage Text (including keywords & Video incorporation)
• Images tag optimization etc.

While indexing, Google segregates canonical & duplicates.  

Canonical denotes the same website appears with different prefixes. For example, say with the WWW version and without.

Google index is an extensive database hosted on thousands of computers.

There is no guarantee that Google will index every page of your website.

These things create issues for indexing

1. Low or thin content on your webpage
2. Robots file disallowed for indexing
3. Complex website design creates indexing difficulties

Last is serving search results

When a user types a query, the search algorithm checks the highest quality pages most relevant to the user.

The relevancy depends on hundreds of factors, including:

1. Users location
2. Language
3. The device they are using
4. Content quality
5. Content relevancy
6. Search tags
7. Site speed
8. User interaction
9. time on website
10. Reviews
11. Domain age
12. Website performance
13. Mobile compatibility
14. Browser compatibility

Although, the list is long.

Above are only a few primary factors influencing website rankings.

We also call them SERP (search engine ranking positions).

Conclusion

If your website is not performing in search results, you should contact a Search Marketing Specialist or a digital marketing company.

They may conduct an online website audit to determine factors necessary for search rankings.

They can also check if your website is facing any penalty from Google.

Ending Note

Search technology is high; underestimating Google may prove more harm than good.

Please never use unethical search practices. The most common is copying content, which proves fatal for both the domain and website.

Thank you very much for going through the article.